Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Recently I got in the mail from CD Universe (which has sent me so many e-mails promoting not only their music and movie releases but so many cannabis products I think any day now they’ll change their name to C B D Universe) an intriguing CD I’d ordered on the Retrieval Records label: Unissued on 78’s: 1927-1934 . Producer Nick Dellow (who’s also a contributor to the Bixography Forum) began with a note in his liner booklet which said, “‘Unissued on 78’ means just that and no more. Certainly some of the recordings here have appeared on LP’s and even CD’s, but long enough ago for those issues to have become collectible in their own right.” I guess Nick put that in there to forestall people trying to nit-pick his selections to death and write him letters saying, “What do you mean, ‘unissued’? I’ve had some of these songs for years!” I did catch Dellow out on one odd mistake at the very beginning of hi...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Monday I received a Frank “Tram” Trumbauer collection from CD Universe that seems to have come from a company with three different imprints: Fabulous, Acrobat ahd their parent company, Trapeze. I was a bit disappointed that it contained only one of Tram’s last three studio recordings for Capitol in 1946, “You Took Advantage of Me” – though the other two are available on YouTube. These were the sessions Tram didn’t want released because the other musicians had shown up drunk – the man who’d put up with Bix Beiderbecke for five years probably thought, “Here we go again … ” – and they didn’t come out until Capitol used one of them in 1952 to fill out a compilation album of great jazz saxophonists called Sax Stylists , but they’re quite remarkable and if I’d heard them “blind” I probably would have guessed Paul Desmond. They sound an awful lot like him even though Desmond hadn’t recorded yet when...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This morning I listened to Prokofieff’s opera The Fiery Angel in its initial recording, a French-language performance from 1957 apparently recorded for Paris Radio and featuring members of the original cast from the 1954 world premiere. Prokofieff wrote the piece (based on a Russian writer’s novel but set in medieval Germany) in the 1920’s but never got it performed in his lifetime, though the score was published. Later he based his Third Symphony on music he’d composed for the opera just to get it heard somewhere , in some form. The plot is the story of a young woman, Renata, who’s convinced that she’s in love with an angel, who turns her down but promises he will return some day in human form. A lecherous Count convinces her that he is her angel, and he gets her to have sex with him, but then he abandons her. Another man, the knight Ruprecht, falls in love with her but all she wants from him is t...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I had a Blu-Ray disc I wanted to run of Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 opera Hamlet in a new production from 2019 featuring the chorus of the Opéra-Comique (do I really need to explain once again that the name of the venue has nothing necessarily to do with the “comic” or non-“comic” nature of the works performed there? Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen , both with famously un happy endings, were premiered at the Opéra-Comique) and the group Les Éléments along with the Orchestre des Champs-Élysees conducted by Louis Langrée.The stars were baritone Stéphane Degout as Hamlet (Thomas was originally going to compose the role for tenor, but the famous baritone Jean-Baptiste Fauré – best known today as the composer of the song “Les Rameaux” – was “between parts” just then so it became a vehicle for him), coloratura soprano Sabine Deviellhe as Ophelia, bass Laurent Alvaro as Claudius, mezz...

Hot Flashes: Rare High-Quality Short-Lived Bands: Their Complete Recordings Vintage Music Productions VMP 0191 (2006) Musical Stevedores: “Happy Rhythm,” “Honeycomb Harmony”: Freddie Jenkins, Louis Metcalf (t), Henry Hicks (tb), Clarence Grimes, Charlie Holmes (as, ss, cl), Cliff Jackson (p, cymbal), Elmer Snowden (bjo), Bud Hicks (b-b, scat vcl) – N.Y.C., 1/16/29 (Columbia) Trombone Red and His Blue Six: “Greasey [sic] Plate Stomp,” “B-Flat Blues” Charlie Gaines or Jabbo Smith (t), Robert Freeman (tb), Otto Hardwick (as), Duke Ellington (p), Fred Guy (bjo), Sonny Greer (d), unk. (vcl) – N.Y.C., 6/18/31 (Columbia) Charlie Skeete and His Orchestra: “Tampeekoe,” “Deep Henderson” Leonard Davis, Tommy Hodges (t), Tommy Jones (tb), Gene Johnson (cl, as, bs-s), Cliff Glover (cl, as, ts), Charlie Skeete (p, dir), Joe Jones (bjo), Bill Brown (b-b), Tommy Benford (d) – N.Y.C., 6/8/26 (Edison) Lee Weimer’s Black and White Aces: “Louisiana Bo Bo,” “The Merry Widow’s Got a Sweetie Now” ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I’ve been listening to a Boogieology Records CD compilation called The Atlas Records Story – Atlas Records having been a short-lived independent label based in Los Angeles in the mid-1940’s. It’ was founded by a songwriter named Robert Scherman and is most notable for being Nat “King” Cole’s last label before he started his long and prosperous career on Capitol in 1943 – in fact Capitol actually bought Cole’s contract from Atlas and also got some masters Cole had recorded for Atlas that became his first Capitol releases (much the way Sam Phillips’ sale of Elvis Presley’s Sun Records contract to RCA Victor included five previously unissued songs he’d recorded for Sun). The result was that Cole had only four songs actually released on Atlas, the ballads “My Lips Remember Your Kisses” (written by Robert Scherman) and “Let’s Pretend” and the jazz tunes “Got a Penny, Benny” (vocals by Cole and the other...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s 41st annual “A Capitol Fourth” concert on PBS was an interesting index into how much the fear of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic that virus started has receded. Just over a month before the analogous event, the National Memorial Day Concert, had taken place in what’s become the way we’ve expected during the viral pandemic, coming from various remote locations and held at a largely empty National Mall with all the participants masked except when they were actually talking or singing. This one was held before a big crowd at the Mall even though a lot of the individual segments were still coming in from remote locations, ranging from Los Angeles and San Francisco to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, fabled original home of the Grand Ole Opry before it moved to “Opryland, U.S.A.,” what amounts to a country-music theme park. Unlike the National Memorial Day “Concert,” which I put in q...